Posts by Conundrum1885

Is there a cure for cancer sitting at the back of the medicine cabinet already?

Re. unusual cancer treatments

A while back some work was done by (IIRC) Kanzius on using gold nanoparticles to treat solid tumors as they would absorb certain microwave-infrared (3um) wavelengths and superheat thus heat stressing the cancer cells beyond their survival point (hyperthermal)

This was based on earlier work where researchers experimenting with diathermy noticed coincidentally that nearby tumors regressed weeks later despite being quite far away from the probe(s).

Quite a few drugs used for routine conditions have an anti-cancer effect but the trick is to balance the side effects and ensure that the combination doesen't critically deplete some liver enzyme or affect kidney function.

UK Supreme Court waves through indiscriminate police surveillance

Re: It's Over for Democracy

There was I concerned that selling used drives on Greedbay might get me Gitmo'd.

Evidently not, lots of people sell used computers with all their downloaded pr0n/warez/etc still on them as a "value added bonus" .

I did find out that a certain TLA reads this forum, got a phone call at 7am one morning to discuss some random comment or other and reassure me that "no it wasn't illegal to work on ZPE/etc" .. but of course thats what they *want* you to think.

Never did find out who 0wn3d my routers though, still have them here if someone wants to forensically analyze them to see why someone would find my research so interesting.

Stray positrons caught on ISS hint at DARK MATTER source

Re: Source of positrons ?? man made n observed in Cosmic Rays since the 1930's...

MiHsC, simples.

Chappie: The AI tale that’s about heart, not intelligence

Re. Short Circuit 2

Same here..

I did notice the similarities in design though, sort of like a cross between "Short Circuit" and "Robocop" ..

One major plot hole, why would the same helmet work on a human brain AND one based on silicon carbide or whatever Chappie's was based on? Surely it would need major modification.. ?

Curiosity rover RENDERED ARMLESS by short circuit

Re. If it's a power problem...`

No DiSaSseMble NuMbEr Five...

'Fry-OS 8' iPhone BLEW UP MY PANTS wails roasted Johnson

Could have been

Tiny glass fragment that pierced the battery, won't always show up when the original (possibly very minor) damage occurred.

If it got between battery and glass case over time might have pierced the outer casing and caused S/C.

Air gaps: Happy gas for infosec or a noble but inert idea?

Re. TEMPEST

Ages ago I recall reading of a high value target being compromised using off-the-shelf commonplace mains brick adapters with hidden radio transmitter and unijunction/capacitor based long duration timer so it only transmitted during the weekly board meetings.

Took months for the company to find how their competitor seemed to know they were in financial difficulty because a key part discussed in earlier meetings mysteriously went out of stock just before a large order thanks to some well timed advance orders by another company that normally never used this supplier.

Sad to say they got bought out shortly thereafter with lots of needless job losses..

Boffins now one step closer to male birth control pill

RE. Re. Animal testing

I thought that undergraduates would be the ideal test uhm, body for this research.

They are responsible enough to use protection anyway and plus samples can be collected to see if it is actually working to fine tune the dose.

Also relevant is that it is quite simple to detect gametes and this is probably within the feasibility of using an Iphone camera and UV filter on the flash LED to measure fluorescence.

Assemblers were once people: My aunt did it for NASA

The original EPROM spec

Actually included X-ray erasure because UV light wouldn't do the trick.

I hear that NASA still used 25+ year old CPUs (8086) in their Shuttle solid rocket boosters and have to trawl online auctions for new-in-box chips because they aren't made any more.

The Russian versions do work but aren't quite similar enough for legacy code which has to work 100% of the time.

The ISS still runs on decades old technology and the laptops are still Pentium based because none of the modern CPUs <ie sub 100nm) will run for long in space without crashing.

Back in the day

An engineer once told me of a time a very old (PDP-11?) machine had some hard-to-trace timing related problem. He did some digging and found a wire connecting two adjacent pins on an IC which seemed to serve no purpose but when disconnected stopped the machine working. Shorting the two pins also did, so he traced. And traced. AND traced. 6 feet of wire later, realized that this was a very effective delay line !

Turns out the problem was actually not that IC at all but something else.

An even more hilarious anecdote is that in the days when vacuum tubes were king and transistors weren't stable or cheap enough for computers the engineers when faced with a working but unstable batch of expen$ive tubes procured a large domestic oven and "cooked" the tubes to cause the presumably slightly underfired getters to grab some more stray molecules and render the tubes stable at the high speeds used.

Then used a very ingenious handheld mini-Tesla Coil based diagnostics rig to measure the impedance of the tube with a metal kitchen scourer on the cap and a second to all other pins in order to avoid plugging the valves in and potentially damaging them, if the valve passed this test it was used or if not cooked again.

Some of these lasted several months in use so obviously the weak ones were being weeded out.

RIP Leonard Nimoy: He lived long and prospered

RIP Spock

Dying from a largely preventable disease is not logical.

Maybe this will make people wake up and give up the evil weed already.

Russia considers keeping its own half of the ISS alive after 2024

Its not that hard

The latest idea is to outfit ISS with an EMDrive (Cannae Drive) as it has most of the required hardware including solar panel positioners.

This would get around that annoying reboosting problem and allow otherwise useless hardware to serve some purpose as a lunar station.

Also feasible would be adding radiation shielding to ISS using a superconducting magnet at each end powered by the same solar modules as once energized and kept at <120K they should be stable for years.

New Mexico mulls sale of first US commercial spaceport (and LOHAN launchpad)

Re. spaceport

Seems a shame to just trash it, as it would make an ideal backup landing strip for the B-2 and Aurora.

Also one suggestion doing the rounds on various forums is to use it to test Musk's "Hyperloop" and other exotic projects including the WEAV.

HAWKING ALERT: Leave planet Earth, find a new home. Stupid humans

Re: *sigh*

Hmm.

So hovering outside the ISS with a "For Sale, $1B o.n.o" sign scrolling around the perimeter of the" IXS Tesla" would be enough then?

The main problem is I'd never get clearance to launch something this experimental.

Re: *sigh*

I have some ideas about gravity if the physics community will take me seriously.

Google "MiHsC" as the secret to a-grav is in extending MiHsC into 11 dimensions by analyzing the Higgs field in condensed matter to fully solve the equations of quantum gravity.

'Lenovo, Superfish put smut on my system' – class-action lawsuit

This is why

The first thing I do when a new laptop arrives is the hard disk gets ripped out and stored safely or at least forensically imaged, THEN I get to work nuke&paving it and putting Windows or preferably Xubuntu on it.

I feel sorry for the people affected by this, Lenovo should fess up and pay out, if needs be recalling all the affected machines and if it can't be repaired offering a full refund.

Or be nice and send out an SSD with a clean Win8.1 on it, thereby giving customers a nice present for their trouble.

DARPA's 'Cortical Modem' will plug straight into your brain

Re. visual prosthetics

Make this available to the blind already.

Current "state of the art" circa 1997 (BSc Medical Electronics) was some 60 electrodes and invasive surgery with continuous maintenance to keep the patient alive.

Your hard drives were riddled with NSA spyware for years

RE. failed drives

I have two here if someone has a fix tool.

Both Maxtor Diamondmax

Boffins grasp Big Knob, get ready to go ALL THE WAY at the LHC proton-punisher

Re. Crash!

Some theories suggest that under certain conditions it might be possible to generate very short lived black holes (1 per second IIRC) using the LHC if a certain subset of M theory is correct ie compact extra dimensions.

The intriguing aspect here is that as these micro BH's decay we could be able to unravel a lot of the unknowns in quantum gravity as well as proving that extra unseen dimensions do indeed exist.

See http://www.livescience.com/27811-creating-mini-black-holes.html

Ex-NASA boffin dreams of PREDATOR-ish tech in humble microwaves

Re. FLIR

Cough Lepton /cough

ATTENTION SETI scientists! It's TOO LATE: ALIENS will ATTACK in 2049

Re. Re. Googloid life form

Maybe the aliens have figured out how to travel FTL using folded space technology and sidestepping the requirement for a nearly absurd amount of energy by merely borrowing it from a small self contained bottle Universe generated using a scaled up version of the LHC.

Once the journey is completed the system transfers the energy back in less than the Planck time so that the overall energy conservation is balanced again.

French plod can BAN access to any website – NO court order needed

RE. Re. Surprise surprise

It seems that the French Government have fallen into the logical trap of removing existing rights for the illusion of more security.

It it interesting to note that thanks to an overlap of networks my 3G dongle sometimes picks up Voda FR and connects to it.

Now Samsung's spying smart TVs insert ADS in YOUR OWN movies

Re: Tired of Samsung

Same here, my Samsung TV won't play many common types of media files including: DivX, XVID, anything from Apple even if its been fully paid for.

It won't even display JPEGs with some size/resolution combinations so this makes it totally useless IMHO.

Did I mention that the Freeview has never worked out of the box despite two firmware updates, no signal detected whatsoever despite this being an advertised feature.

The remote often takes a full 20 seconds to switch modes and the HDMI won't work with RaspPi or my recent Samsung laptop unless the lead is plugged in one specific way round.

The even better feature with these 22LE models is that the power supply can fail with no warning resulting in a flashing white light or solid red.

Watch it: It's watching you as you watch it (Your Samsung TV is)

Re. More movie and tv story content

Too late, this was done already by "The Watch".

It did mention using cameras on computers as well..

Re. Re: A little surgery

With a lot of features in software (ie FPGAs) these days it is quite feasible for example to make a socket reconfigure its function and many newer cameras and phones do this already.

For example on certain Samsung smart phones the "headphone" socket outputs video if a certain impedance presents itself on IIRC the tip and sleeve.

I did recall a datasheet suggesting that some monitors have this feature for in factory firmware flashing via normally unused pins on the VGA/DVI input and certainly Sky boxen can be reflashed over the air or through pins on the SCART input.

Advertisers are going to be thrilled with this as they could potentially see if someone is discussing particular problems (ie split ends/nail fungus/etc) and then pop up the appropriate adverts at the next break.

Elon Musk: Hover rocket? Check. Hover ship? Check. Let's DO THIS

Re. solar doomflares

About time we had a backup for the ageing SOHO satellite.

'Camera-shy' Raspberry Pi 2 suffers strange 'XENON DEATH FLASH' glitch

Re. blutak

I have used Blutak as an HV insulator before, though even Macgyver would probably laugh it does do the job at least on the output stages for small Cockroft-Walton multipliers.

It does degrade at very high temperatures though but on average 6KV/2mm is fine.

Re. Xenon DEATH FLASH!!!!!

I've also noticed the same effect on Aurora calculators, ie Poundland el cheapo ones.

The culprit is the transparent case and chip mounted on the back of the board as is common with such things.

It does occur to me that as many 'phones use the same construction it could be an interesting way to insert intentional glitches into the running system for the purposes of finding vulnerable sections in the firmware.

Turbocharged quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed, global geekgasm likely

Re: Time to bin my PDP-11/04

How many boards do you have?

This would make good wall art methinks..

ALIEN fossils ON MARS: Curiosity snaps evidence of life

Its possible

Seem to recall reading that Mars could have had liquid water for >200M years so fossils of microbes are quite feasible.

With the loss of the magnetic dynamo the atmosphere was eroded away so this would preserve things nicely.

Flash breaks free from the storage flat earth society

Re. 3D

Are these chips resistant to radiation?

Norks' internet goes TITSUP in possible DDoS attack

Hahahaha

Good one!

Cool Large Hadron Collider to fire into doubly powerful ring

Call The Doctor

The plot is that some undetected zeroday flaw in the LHC control system allows interdimensional hackers to take over the collider and synchronize the collisions so that they intersect with their dimension and allow an invasion to take place.

The Doctor turns up at the crucial moment and throws a sonic spanner in the works, causing the interdimensional aliens to get sent hurtling back into their domain with a polite note not to bother humanity again "Or Else!"

Cue lots of LHe ownage and assorted Sheldon-like boffinry running around screaming because the aliens "Know about superstring particle fluxion theory".

Hint: Amy Pond nearly gets frozen but is rescued at the last second, yet again.

In theory

If certain theories about parallel universes with a reverse arrow of time are correct, then could a sufficiently powerful collision create a link with a parallel Universe also doing the same experiment at the same time?

This could get interesting if so.

SCIENCE LAB TERROR: MYSTERY of the MISSING BRAINS

Re. Hmm

The recipient wouldn't have been Lorena Bobbitt by any chance?

Tough Banana Pi: a Raspberry Pi for colour-blind diehards

Re. Seems to me...

Main annoyance on the Pi is a lack of a SATA2 port.

If this had been included then doubtless sales would have been a lot higher as then any old cheap HDD or SSD could be used instead of an expen$ive USB thumbdrive.

Also a handy feature would have been an IR emitter and learn mode so the Pi could turn the TV to the correct channel without additional complexity.

Bond villains lament as Wicked Lasers withdraw death ray

Re: Evil toys

Yeah, I read that somewhere.

The light emitted from say fluorescent orange paint is actually bright enough to do damage close up.

Fortunately this is fixable by simply using the OD6+ goggles which block blue AND red light, available from the folks on laserpointerforums.

Re. Soo whats available?

Hi, I am in the process of acquiring a dead (busted Z axis) 3D printer for a lot less than a new one.

It would be ideal for this PLUS it is all open source so a laser mod would be an afternoon's work.

My current plan is to use a 12W red phlatlight (cough ca$io ebay /cough) and a UV burner diode to etch difficult materials; the idea here is that multiple wavelengths allow finer etching as the power to the main burner can be kept low due to the 12W of red making up the difference

This is also handy for my other project of etching complex heterostructures on superconducting precursors (ie Mott insulator) under glass in an O2 atmosphere at >150C, the idea is that the oxygen only anneals where the laser hits the Mott insulator.

150C+laser = closer to 800C so the required structure forms in seconds whereas with conventional annealing it would take tens of hours.

This would be handy for forming neural net pathways but then the problem becomes how to make thermal tolerant CPUs that can withstand >900C reliably. (SiC maybe?)

Anyone interested in schematics?

Google force beam theories

Google force beam theories

Hi, I assume people here have seen the articles on Daily Mail etc.

I have a theory that it might be an experimental antigravity device Google are working on.

The effect seems to be their attempt at making a CTC/QC hybrid by generating an antigravity beam within the system to form a closed timelike curve, also the axial magnetic field would further stabilize the quantum computer by phase locking the qubits to a fixed dimensional reference point.

This would also explain the side effects, as electrostatic charge buildup would be expected due to the connection between gravitomagnetic and electromagnetic fields.

In this case the static beam would extend out of the device for hundreds of feet despite being in a basement under Google's HQ and pass through the shielding layers.

Fortunately it appears most of the effects are minor but still they should be careful with this as a lot of bad things have been known to happen with strong magnetic fields (google "MRI quench")...

Spying

Update 25/11/14

If anyone would like me to send them the (two) broken routers let me know.

It appears that some very strange stuff is going on at Google London, and might actually have to do with antigravity research as the electrostatic leakage is a known side effect.

If this is the case then anyone with an accelerometer should be able to detect a slight precession, the best way to be sure is to see if a Geiger counter also shows an increase in background radiation which would suggest accelerated nuclear decay in the antigravity beam.

Spinning superconductors is my best guess at this time, evidently someone saw my ideas about using two counter-rotating LN2 cooled Y123 disks to magnify the effect at the edges where the fields interact.

If this is the case they really are playing with unearthly forces and should stop before something very bad happens (read dimensional portal incursion!)

Mysterious BEAM outside London Googleplex ZAPPED

Re. force field

Anecdotal reports of "force field" like effects have been noticed by Bill Beaty of amasci.com fame, typically in plastics factories handling large amounts of glossy sheets of PET/PEEK/etc.

Usually it goes away if the humidity changes so it is possible that this was indeed the fix.

I actually had a similar effect manifest itself once (only!) when messing with miniature Tesla Coil, in my case a piece of equipment across the room levitated for a split second and for only a moment as I reached across to turn it off felt something grab my shoulder (seriously!) despite being well away from the charged parts.

This was running from a bodged setup involving CCFL inverters wired in parallel, homemade Veroboard spark gap, internal 9 turn primary and a clock wire 4" secondary which after said event got sent to a fellow TC'er as a freebie.

Come to think of it, haven't heard from the guy since...

The next big thing in medical science: POO TRANSPLANTS

A while back

There was a "brown ribbon day" to promote FMT.

Also relevant, this technique has been used since antiquity by rabbit and cavy owners to "fix" a sick rabbit with gut related problems.

The trick it seems is to use the right kind of pellet and feed it to the rabbit a piece at a time, repeating every day until it improves.

Seems to work a lot better than antibiotics for the same reason, in fact the latest consensus is that the problem was caused by excessive use of antibiotics in farm animals and for treating colds and flu without first finding out if the secondary infection was even responsive.

There's even a name for the FMT delivery method:- Crapsules.

I need a password to BRAKE? What? No! STOP! Aaaargh!

Re. Voice control

Not as bad as "Google Safesearch Off Me*ts*in Im feeling Lucky" yelled at people with Google Glass.

:-)

Re. self driving cars, one would hope that there would be an override in the form of a missle style lidded launch key with "!Emergency Stop!" placed somewhere sensible.

Hehehehe

LMAO, ROTFL and all that.

At the thought of "Siri, brake now.. and it does. Full emergency brake with anchors and handbrake for good measure, resulting in a faceplant.

I had something similar happen with a previous car, for no apparent reason it decided at 25 mph to slam into REVERSE resulting in a horrible sound of mashing gears and more lights than NCC-1701 escaping from the Romulans appearing on the dashboard, the likes of which I've never seen before or since.

Then it stalled in the middle of the (*&*(^!£ING ROAD and wouldn't start, later discovered this little beauty was caused by a faulty internally shorted 12V battery causing the automatic controller to throw a wobbly and lose power unexpectedly.

Needless to say it got sold on with a new battery and a polite note to get the thing nuke and paved at a proper garage with a diagnostic computer.

Intel offers ingenious piece of 10TB 3D NAND chippery

Re. difference

Well 100 metal layers would be a *lot* more compact than stacked die.

Last time I checked even with thinned wafers the best that could be done (in 2013) was 17 layers in a microSD sized package and this was with optimum packing with all wafers in use.

The newer 64 and 128GB microSDs are just more dense (18nm instead of 22)

Re. Flash

I can foresee this replacing Bluray as a long term storage medium, write once variants of 3D-NAND without the ability to rewrite would be stable for decades.

Also having movies on a microSD sized card would be very handy, save on storage space AND make Apple mad for not installing microSD on their products :-) :-)

Glasgow boffins: We can now do it, Captain. We DO have the molecular storage power

Re. DNA/RNA

In this case, its turtles all the way down.

Nano sized turtles armed with itty bitty molecule sized toothpicks, pushing the atoms around like an army of little elves at Gringotts.

I can't wait for my terabyte Ipod Shuffle, come on Apple and get this on the shelves already.

RRP $299.99 sounds about right.

LIFE, JIM? Comet probot lander found 'ORGANICS' on far-off iceball

Re. Wait a second....

Well, complex organics could *possibly* be deposited over billions of years by electrostatics from passing through various star systems so its possible that this is indeed how life on Earth started.

Comets may have ended up with organics in the centre due to melting/freezing cycles so it is likely that simple organisms could have evolved during the liquid/slush phases.

In fact, electrostatics combined with galactic cosmic rays could explain organisms like Deinococcus radiodurans which IIRC has been seriously considered as a possible extraterrestrial organism having seeded life during the Cambrian era and remained a virtual living fossil while its descendants colonized the Earth and evolved into us.